i want to read On Kawara's twitter feed - https://twitter.com/on_kawara and every time he tweets the message "I AM STILL ALIVE #art" (which he does daily and is the only thing he does with the twitter account) i want the plant to be watered.
You've said that. Any you are, in theory at least, reading something. What ARE you reading? Serial.print() the characters to find out.
Only when you have a clue that the parsing code is parsing the right data will you have a hope of debugging it.